Strunk and White

[kudra]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post. I have been reviewing for the past year or so from my college texts after letting my Chinese more or less lie fallow for a decade or 2.

Here is a sentence from my copy of Written Standard Chinese, vol. 3, Huang and Stimson. Chapter 38, longer sentence 7.

昨天考試的時候﹐老師出去了一會兒。老師回來的時候﹐他正在抄坐在他旁邊的一個同學的卷被老師捉到了。

Actually the sentence in my copy uses juan4zi and not just juan4. But for some reason my trial copy of NJStar Communicator changes the 卷 into 捲when I add the 子after the 卷. So that is the first question -- can anybody explain what is going on with NJStar in this case? A bug, or a nuisance feature to get me to buy? A non-standard usage by the authors with NJStar autocorrecting?

Second question

My translation: Yesterday during the exam, the professor went out for a little while. When the professor came back, he (who) was just then copying the exam (answers) from a classmate sitting next to him, was caught by the professor.

So I read this a couple times before realizing that the professor was not doing the copying(duh). Then I was surprised at myself since having worked through chapters 31-37 I thought I was getting used to parsing written Chinese, at least at the level of a particular lesson.

Certainly, when writing Chinese, there is no reason Huang and Stimson should have felt constrained to follow Strunk’s admonition “The relative pronoun should come, as a rule, immediately after its antecedent.”

http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html#16.

Still I am interested to know whether, when composing my own sentences in Chinese, I can throw out Strunk’s rule. Or is it a good rule even in written Chinese? My guess is that Strunk’s rule just has no authority for writers in Chinese.

This begs the question, is there a analogous work to Strunk and White, for written Chinese.?

Thanks.

[gougou]

他 is a personal pronoun, not a relative pronoun, so this rule does not apply either way.

Apart from that, I would strongly disadvise applying a work concerning the English language to the Chinese language. Even with languages much closer to each other, this is not going to work.

Try to keep an open mind when studying a new language, try to let yourself be influenced as little as possible by English grammar.

I am not sure about a Chinese equivalent to the Elements of Style, but I read that there is no authoritative work on Chinese grammar.

[kudra]

gougou, thanks for the comment.

I didn’t mean to suggest that English grammar rules or style guidelines should necessarily have anything to do with Chinese.

In the sentence in the original post, I suppose there is an implied 的那個人 before 被, so that the whole thing comes out as a basic topic-comment pattern.

What I was trying to get at is not so much Strunk’s specific rule about relative pronouns. That specific rule comes under the general guideline of “Keep related words together”, which is motivated by the idea of showing consideration to the reader by minimizing ambiguity. I suppose what I was trying to get at was, in the context of expository style (if there is such a style in standard written Chinese), does the goal of minimizing ambiguity for the reader still apply, and if so does “keep related words together” have any relevance? Again, if I had to guess, I’d say no to the later, as per gougou’s comments. As for minimizing ambiguity for the reader, even within the context of standard patterns and compressed forms, well, is it even a goal? If so, there would seem to be a tradeoff between minimizing ambiguity and the degree of compression or abbreviation. I am probably jumping the gun, and this will all be clear without reference to Strunk by the time I can read newspapers, etc.

[gougou]

I am no expert on Chinese grammar, but one thing I can assure you: the concept of minimizing ambiguity is completely unheard of in China. In fact, it does not work with the Chinese language per definition.

Mostly, the context should help you figure out what exactly a person is talking about, but even between two native speakers that know each other, misunderstandings (or at least the need for clarification) are much more frequent than in Europe. At least I got this impression so far.

As to your original sentence, I believe the 他 does not refer to the teacher, but to the person who is actually copying. Also, I am not sure whether it is possible to skip a whole 的那個人, as far as I know the 的 stays in these cases. But then I should stress again that I am no expert on this, maybe a native speaker can help out here?